Getting Started

Help! What do I do?

We know using a new product can be daunting, and Exercism is a little complicated. So here's a really simple set of instructions to get you started.

Sign up

Sign up at exercism.io using either your GitHub account, or by using your email address and choose a password.

If you sign up using an email address, you now need to confirm it. Look for the email, click the link, then log in.

Language and exercises

You will now see a list of all the language tracks you can join. You can click through as many as you want to explore.

Once you've found a language you want to join, click the "Join Track" button.

You will now be taken into your new track. You'll see a core set of exercises at the top and some side-exercises below.

Start with the first core exercise on the track, which is normally called "Hello World". Click on the exercise to begin.

You will see some information and some instructions on the left-hand side and a button on the right-hand side labelled "Begin Walkthrough". Click on this and follow the instructions.

Submit your solution, mentoring

You should now have the CLI installed and the exercise downloaded to your computer. Solve the exercise and then upload it using exercism submit /PATH/TO/SOLUTION

In your web-browser, go back to the language tracks page, choose your exercise and the exercise you've just worked on. You will now see your solution online and notice that it is awaiting a mentor.

A mentor will now come and give you feedback on your solution. This can happen really quickly (15 minutes) or take a little while (a day or two) depending on demand. In the meantime, you will find other exercises on your track are available for you to solve!

Iterations, resubmit

Once you've received feedback, you can make some changes to your solution and then resubmit it (see step 8). This may happen a couple of times before the solution is approved.

Once the solution is approved by a mentor, you click 'complete' to mark the solution completed. This will unlock lots more exercises.

Get involved: mentoring or maintaining a track

You're now an Exercism pro! :)

Fancy giving back to Exercism and helping others? We always need more mentors and track maintainers and we'd love you to get involved!